Might as well confess to spending a few snatched moments this week biting my nails over the woes of the Roman Catholic Church. Besides being really depressing, and in the case of that Cupich character completely appalling, it has only entrenched me in my natural inclination to talk more about the depravity of humanity rather than any kind of creaturely goodness we might find lying around in a dark cupboard.
I mean, remember in the dim recesses of your Bible memory, how that priest one time was clearing out an old dusty furniture laden room in the Temple, and happened upon a scroll that he didn’t recognize. He wiped off the dust and took it out to see if he couldn’t get some better light. He pried it opened and began reading and found his whole life turned over. He was completely unmoored.
Why? What was this book, flung away into the cluttered cells surrounding that ancient place of worship? It wasn’t a record of all the good things he had done over the course of his short life. It wasn’t an account of Israel’s faithful worship of God century by century. It wasn’t a shopping list.
It turned out to be the Scriptures—the record of God’s work to restore a rebellious and corrupt creation to himself—and no one even remembered it was there.
I mean, what were they doing all that time? All those years? Going from memory? You show up for work, you put on your robe, you head out into the heat of the day to start slaughtering sheep for the something something of the people, but you can’t exactly remember why you’re doing it except that the person before you told you what to do. It’s a matter of just carrying on. But the person before you didn’t remember exactly either.
When the heat of the day begins to wane you stagger off to get out of your hot robe and finally go home. The courtyard stands empty and still and you’re so tired. You’ve worked hard. But on the way you manage to find it within yourself to stop and offer some small sacrifice to some other god. Down in the valley, of course, one king, at least, took it upon himself to take his own child and kill him. Indeed, in all of Israel, it was possible to offer up just a little something under every green tree. Who knows how many there were. But it doesn’t matter—three or a hundred—you have missed the point. All the worship was supposed to go on in the Temple and to God only. It said in the book. It was plainly there.
And why? Because God is mean? Because he’s so unkind he wants to gather all the worship for himself? Not at all. Because he knows that when we wander away from him and do the thing that seems best to us, we will break apart the lives of other people, we will squander his creation, and we will destroy our own souls.
Our works, as it says early on in that ancient and forgotten book, are only evil continually. Every single one of us is wicked and would do every evil thing we could without God restraining us, drawing us back, bringing about repentance. We will always throw the book away and do whatever we want. That is the human condition.
And this condition is even inside the church. Tragically so. All of us sitting in the pew, all of us puttering around in the sacristy, all of us jostling for places of power and influence, whether at the potluck table or on the parish council or in the smooth cool halls of real power. We are not good. The people at the top aren’t good, but neither are the people at the bottom.
The difference between the church and the world is that we don’t have to wonder what the remedy might be. Once you go digging in the cupboard and find your copy of the book, that strange but plainly articulated relationship of God with humanity, and you read it, you find very easily what to do.
Repent. Turn from your wicked ways and live. Why will you die? Turn and live. When you repent, when you tear your beautiful red clerical robe and pour ash on your head, God is faithful and just and will forgive you because he bore the sins of humanity in himself on the cross. You can live. But not if you don’t climb down from your corrupt gilded chair and weep over your wretched sin.
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